Dear Mike

Hey Mike! Something kinda cool happened this weekend, completely out of the blue. You're favorite Croat is currently spending his traditional "Every 3 years" vacation in the US biking the East Coast. On Saturday night, one of your favorite drummers (so favorite that you actually fucking PAID him!) who is living in Baltimore now, Jimmy Flame, was playing a gig with his new band Unung Heroes (he's also going back to Loyola for his Master's but that's a different post) at a house party. Sometime around 10:30 pm Saturday night, out of the blue Flame messaged me saying "I'm hanging our with Dario (Adam) in DC at a show I'm playing! He says Hi!" I was totally blown away and delighted, how cool is it that the world we created offers the opportunity for these things to happen. I honestly don't know that Jimmy and Dario met before - but I am pretty sure Adam knows who Jimmy is and that he played with us....but maybe he didn't and they just sta

Hey Mike. Wallowing a bunch lately - but then I try and spin it, because what if I end up like my mom not being able to remember ANYTHING? Might as well roll around in it while I still can - especially as this fucking flat patch of life is really a slog. Anyway, the Violent Femmes came on my Sp*tify feed and I immediately thought about one of my earliest dates with you (possibly the earliest? Hard to remember, since it's all so rum-soaked and speed-blended). That Violent Femmes show that I only remember from the seats in Van Duzer (I think - it was definitely a theater, so I think that was the only HSU location then for that?) and definitely, as I'm doing a deep dive into VF, explains my affinity for Jonathan Richman. Though I still hate the Blister song that has been played out, they are pretty damn punk rock and arty and all of that weirdo energy I loved about punk initially. I remember ripping down a VF poster off a pole, though literally do not remember if that was before

Hey Mike. Look, I know you always wanted a kid - on our first option to become parents you very vividly made the case that "If we have a kid and teach it to play drums, we'll always have a drummer" - or you may have said it on the occasion of our second chance to have a kid. But either or both times, it struck me as not the best way to approach parenthood. Of course, in hindsight, there's never a best time, or way to have kids. That being said, I am currently both super happy to not be responsible for the aboslute monstrosity of a generation that "Z" is - because in my head, I was all set to regret that I won't have anyone to take care of me in my old age (should I manage to live that long) and relived that none of this bullshit is my fault. Lately though, I don't know if any kid I would have had would give two shits about me (or you) at this point anyway. I mean the one kid you did have has changed their gender, and seems fully on board (as one wou

Man Mike, it has been a rough couple of weeks. Car went belly-up in typical fashion less than a month after a very traumatic brake & axle service. A hole in a hose led to overheating, and me pushing the limits and winding up with what is best-case scenario a blown head gasket, and worst-case a blown engine (still starts, but who knows how much longer that will last, and it definitely cannot be driven). Well, its three weeks later and I missed the FIFTH anniversary of you punching out of this...this...life? Yeah. It is hard not to think you are better off - I guess that is the thing that they say - death is only hard for the people left behind. Or whatever they say. I mean, at least there are probably a few of us who still think about you occasionally. Or, at least - i do think of you most days in some way (even if it's just when I notice it's 11:11 or popping an especially intense zit). Lately I've begun ondering in earnest if anyone will ever remember me. Hell, I won

 Hey Mike, Not that this will come as a shock to you (or, maybe it will, since you always seemed to think I was as adept as you at remembering all the ephemera of the punk rock life we led) but I seem to keep forgetting who the hell I am. Floundering in normalcy is not something I am amused by. Oddly, it was Sonic Youth's "Kool Thing" that launched me into this spiral. Fucking SHOULD NOT HAVE DONE ALL THAT ACID WHILE WORKING AT TOWER RECORDS! Hilariously this is only funny to me, because I don't think anyone I still talk to even knows I worked at Tower Records, and probably I never told them how that fucking earwig of a song has been burned into my brain by multiple blotter doses an hour or so after count out, back in Spring of '91. Also, I have lost another nephew (Mason) to the Trump Turbine. It's killing young minds and making them all stupid, lazy, and racist. Super disappointing because this kid was always the one I pinned my hopes on to be his own man. I

 New Year's Eve, and not much has changed. I have been sick for well over two weeks now, convinced it's either my heart, my lungs, my brain or any combination of the above. The dog had a seizure yesterday, the first in a while (though of course I haven't ever tracked them, but they do seem to happen a couple times a year now, less often than they did in the mid 2010s) ((the "mid-2010s"?? Good god, how is this even still happening?)) but it made me want to mention, or document something about KC, and I suppose is true with other dogs who live their entire lives in an urban place that is constantly changing - but she is always remembering places we used to frequent. She will still stop at the doorway where the entrance to Charles and David's pet store was. The other day, on the way to the library, she stopped at the door of the last Bartell's we used to frequent. She often tries to pull to McCoy's a place we used to go a lot, but as I get older and less